


Out Of The Night That Covers Me

by WritetheWrong



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 10x03coda, Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 20:59:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8416510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritetheWrong/pseuds/WritetheWrong
Summary: 12x03 Coda - In the aftermath of Mary's abandonment Sam is left with a bottle of scotch and without a spiraling brother.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Oh boys. I was so sad for them both. Such conflicting emotions. I'm pretty glad they didn't go stereotypical with Mary though. She's flawed and human and I like that. I appreciate it. Doesn't mean it didn't rip our hearts out to see Sam and Dean in such pain though. This is a little post 12x03 musing. I really hope you enjoy.

The door slams shut, the ricochet of metal echoing hits Sam right at his heart. Ok then. Ok. So that just happened.

Sam feels wrung out in all the ways it’s possible to be wrung out. And he feels angry that he let his guard down. That they both did with her. That they let her in. They’re usually so good with the walls, with the polite distance, with the rock solid defence barriers erected around their hearts and god damn it they just let her right past them.

They’d forgotten that she was a stranger, sure a stranger with a face of somebody they’d been told about and Dean vaguely remembered their entire life, but she was still a stranger. And Sam’s so disappointed in himself for letting himself let her in.

He’s disappointed and he feels betrayed, and insecure, and sad, desperately, achingly sad for the loss of something he never honestly thought he’d have. But most of all, the over-riding feeling that takes control of him when the door slams, after the initial shock, it’s anger.

It’s not anger for him though, it’s anger for Dean.

Why did she have to do this to Dean?

Sam lets his eyes wander over his brother. Dean is still staring at the floor like he’s trying to burn a hole in it. He looks small, and destroyed and hurt in a way Sam hasn’t seen for a really long time. Probably since Dad. And Sam is angry.

‘Dean…’

‘I’m going out.’ Dean manages, still avoiding Sam’s gaze. ‘I am going to find a bar and I’m going to drink until I forget that that just happened.’

Sam steels himself. Textbook Dean.

‘No,’ he says, stepping further into his brother’s path. ‘No, just stay here. We can have a beer ok, we can talk…’

‘I don’t want to talk Sam.’

 _Well maybe I do._ Sam thinks. _Jesus Dean, maybe I do. Can you just give me that?_ But he doesn’t say it. He’s not willing to let down any more walls tonight. Not ready for another family member to bulldoze through them and leave him shattered and bruised in the wake.

‘I’ll come with you then?’ he tries. Because Dean can’t be alone right now. Sam knows his big brother, knows he’s going to go out and find trouble and a bottle and a spiraling rabbit hole of self loathing and undeserved guilt. It’s Dean’s ‘thing’ and Sam freaking hates it.

‘No’.

‘Dean!’

‘No, Sam.’

And Sam hates his brother for a second. Hates him. Why won’t anyone in this family let him in? Why do they shut down and shut him out whenever it suits them. Why do they never, ever trust him enough to help them?

‘Dean, I know how you feel ok?’ Sam tries. Desperate now to get through.

Dean whirls on him, ‘oh you do do you Sammy? You’ve known her for what five seconds, I’m sure you know exactly how I feel right now.’

Sam flinches. That one hurt. Dean has a way with words at times that can take the breath out of Sam. Even if it is partly true. Even if it’s wholly true. Sam spent his entire childhood feeling shut out of Dean and John’s grief and damn it if he’s still feeling it. Even now after meeting her. He’ll never be a part of that exclusive grief monopoly club. He didn’t remember having her, how could he ever understand what it felt like to lose her? This is the closest he’s come though, he thinks, this is the closest.

‘Ok.’ Sam manages when he can breathe again. He knows what Dean wants, he wants to hit someone, he wants to force the pain out in a physical manner, he’s lashing out and Sam’s the only one in the firing line. He’s goading Sam into a response. Well Sam won’t give him one. He knows Dean in this mode. Knows him inside out. Knows how to respond. ‘Ok Dean, fine, but lets just stay here alright man? Lets just stay here ok? And you can tell me just how little I understand. Hell man you can rage, drink, you can do whatever you need to do right now but please Dean,’ he swallows down the emotion, ‘please don’t shut me out too’.

Sam gives Dean the look, the patented little brother look he’s tweaked to perfection his whole life, the only weapon he has when Dean’s in this mode. The vulnerable, soul baring look that he doesn’t even know he’s doing half the time.

There’s a flash in Dean’s eyes, a flash of fear. His very own cornered wild animal look. He’s wavering. That constant battle between needing to run from facing the issue and needing to protect his brother from any more pain.

Sam holds his breath. One beat, two.

He sees the exact moment he loses. Dean’s wall goes almost visibly up before his eyes. The dead look returns to his expression and now it’s Sam’s turn to want to hit something.

‘Don’t wait up Sammy’. The elder Winchester responds, and he turns on his heel and Sam's abandoned for the second time that night.

 

* * *

 

 

Sam drinks.

 _Two can play that game._ He thinks. _Screw it._ He’s sick of being the sensible one, the one who makes sure everyone doesn’t go off the rails, the mature one who internalizes. Fuck it then, he’s an externalizer tonight.

He makes it through a bottle of scotch like it’s water. It goes down thick and warm like the demon blood used to and Sam feels slightly sick at the thought. He sits at the table in the bunker hallroom, surrounded by centuries of history and stories and never feeling more alone.

He slams down the empty glass on the table and picks up his phone. Still nothing from Dean. Sam scans through the text thread.

_‘Are you coming home tonight?’_

_‘Dean?’_

_‘Just come back, please?’_

_‘This isn’t the answer man.’_

Nada, no reply, nothing. This is what Dean does. Usually Sam would sit up and worry himself sick. Or try and track him to the nearest bar. Dean would be mid fight with some idiot in a bar who thought they’d spotted an easy scrap. Sam would pull him away, get himself in the middle, Dean would apologize, Sam would haul him home, arm around his shoulder. He’d put his brother to bed and hope that maybe next time Dean would want to stay with him rather than run off to some bar for answers.

He never did though. Sam doesn’t know what it is about him that makes it so hard for Dean to open up sometimes. They’re all each other have. Have been for almost their entire lives. Yet he still can’t get through to Dean at times. Can’t be what he needs. Sometimes he can, but when Dean’s hurting like now, it’s almost a given that he’ll shut down.

It’s devastatingly predictable.

Sam sits in the darkness, pours another glass, the glass is cold in his palm and he runs it along his forehead.

He’s a man of logic by nature. It’s always been easier for him to try and take a step back from a situation and apply head over heart. He tries it now.

Ok so it’s got to be really, really tough for her. To come back to adults, grown men, to leave babies and to be faced with this. Two men who are self sufficient and battle hardened and the furthest thing from the innocent souls she left behind. That must be tough. And to lose the love of her life. To return to a world, a family where she doesn’t seem to fit. Logically it makes all the sense in the world why mom would feel the way she does. Why she would want some space. Some time.

Sam’s head makes the perfect argument. But his heart is screaming.

His heart can’t seem to catch up to his head and every time it beats it’s a sharp steady hammering of rejection, and betrayal and abandonment. She abandoned them. Again.

She pulled a John Winchester.

She had a chance to have them in her life and they weren’t enough for her.

Why aren’t they ever enough to stay for?

Sam’s no saint, nor’s Dean but he thinks they’re good people, he _knows_ Dean is, Dean’s the best person Sam knows. The best person period. So mom might not have a handle on Sam yet that’s fine, he might be lacking in how she imagined he would be, he might not be enough, he can sort of get that. He doesn’t know this woman. Deep down he has no idea what she might think of him, or what she’d been hoping that six month old would turn into that wasn’t enough for her to stick around now.

Sam’s used to letting down a parent. He’s used to not feeling good enough. He was never enough for John, he never towed the line, never was good at being the obedient soldier John needed. So fine, if he’s not enough for Mary. Fine he can deal with that.

But Dean should be. Dean is.

Dean isn’t a let down. He never let Dad down, he obeyed, he was loyal, he did everything asked of him and Dad still walked away from him. And fuck it if Sam’s going to let Mom do the same thing to his brother now.

Dean’s never let go of Mary, of that memory of her. He's had her on a pedestal his entire life. This perfect martyr, Mother Teresa in a nightgown. It always seemed strange to Sam, maybe that’s why he never could connect with the idea of a mother. Dean’s stories all of Sam’s life about their mom seemed way too good to be true. Almost fable like in her perfection. This character ‘Mom’ he’d been told about was up there with mermaids and unicorns for Sam. A concept, a myth that wasn’t real, something you hoped existed but never could quite believe the hype.

It had been nice. It had been really nice to hug her. To have her for a few days. To even have a conversation with her, it had been more than he’d ever thought he’d get. He’d been a motherless child all of his remembered life he could do it again. But he hadn’t felt like he was deprived completely. He’d always had Dean, when he fell down Dean picked him up, when he was hungry Dean made sure they ate, he hadn’t felt the acute loss that so many psychologists and school counselors had tried to drum into him over the years.

He felt the loss in a different way. Like a piece of him had never been fully whole. Like a part of himself was never going to be quite answered. That’s what Sam felt. But he had Dean. He had someone to fill in a lot of those pieces. And he’d patchworked over a lot of that loss. But nobody had patchworked it over for Dean.

Sam’s under no illusion that he is the most important thing to his big brother. That Sam was a distraction and something to protect and love and raise in the absence of their mother. But the blatant truth of the matter was Dean was only 4. He never should have had to take on that responsibility, that weight, that gift, that curse whatever the hell Sam was and still is to Dean.

Sam blames John a lot. Blamed John for years. Sam should have been Johns like Dean was but he wasn’t. Sam has always, always been Deans. Since that very night when he put Sam into Dean’s arms beneath the burning body of their mother Sam has been Dean’s to raise. And it’s for Dean that he really hates his mother right now.

For putting that look back in Dean’s eye. The look that says he’s worth nothing, the look Sam’s been carefully and calculatingly trying to erase from his brother for all of his life. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

He raises the glass in a toast ‘nice to meet you Mom’, downs it, and hurls it at the bunker wall as hard as he can. The glass smashes magnificently. It’s cathartic. Maybe there’s something in this physical response therapy his brother loves so much after all.

And suddenly, hands shaking, body humming with fire, the energy, the white hot rage dispels and he’s left shaky and barefoot and tired.

Where is his furious freaking tornado of a big brother now?

Sam’s always been the volcano to Dean’s tornado, long and slow to explode but when it does total annihilation, devastating everything in its path. _‘You walk out that door, don’t you ever come back’_. Sam can still see the lava, the way it burned and ate at John and at Dean when he left, their own personal fucking Pompeii was Sam.

Well he can’t spend another second of his life feeling responsible for burned fucking corpses , not Johns or Deans, not Jess’s, and not Marys. His mind goes to the memory he locks down in the furthest corner of his mind. Jess. Charred, almost completely unrecognizable lying on a morgue slab. Her fingers, her beautiful nail varnish and that mood ring he brought her for their year anniversary still intact. Her fingers were randomly untouched by the fire on only the one hand. He remembers holding them. Remembers someone having to lead him out of the room. Remembers shaking and sweating, the shock, Dean’s leather jacket, the car, some nameless Stanford campus room, the way he’d counted out enough sleeping pills to finish himself off. Remembers the way he'd palmed them and put them in his mouth and then froze, wild eyed in the mirror, chalk on his tongue, stretched too thin. Spat them out because Dean’s outside the bathroom door, how can I do that to Dean?

He couldn’t do it to Dean then. He couldn’t leave him. They were all each other had.

They still are.

Dean doesn’t know everything about Sam. Doesn’t know he was a swallow away from not being around the past twelve years but then Sam doesn’t know quite everything about Dean either. He’s aware of that. What he does know though is that Dean is brave, Dean is a hero, he’s the best hunter Sam knows, and he’s an even better brother. And he does not deserve to be fucking abandoned again.

Sam moves back to the table, picks up his phone.

He wants to type ‘where are you?’, or even ‘fuck you, you don’t get to walk out on me too’. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t.

Instead he settles for, _’I’m not going anywhere jerk’._ Because maybe it’s what they both need to acknowledge right now. Maybe they both need that reassurance. Once upon a time he’d done it. But once upon a time is gone. Now, walking out is what other people do.

Sam waits for Dean to come back.


End file.
